“FIFTEEN MINUTES!” I shouted, and hung up.
It took me almost fifteen minutes just to get through Washington Square, once a graveyard, also a popular place for hanging criminals, and now the heart of NYU and Greenwich Village. The square was packed with folks in costume, cops, and people hawking things, from hot dogs to marijuana. By the statue of Garibaldi, I had to squeeze past a guy who was holding a big stick full of Ariel the Little Mermaid dolls. I wondered if you could kill someone with a stick full of mermaid dolls.
“Oh, Joey!” one young girl with a distinctly New York accent shrilled above the din. “Stop, Joey! You’re killin’ me.” Near the bocce court, a boy with a big ring through his nose was nose-kissing a laughing girl with pierced eyebrows, which looked to me like an ugly accident waiting to happen.
What will kids do next? I thought. I hear some get branded—you know, with hot irons. Still, these two looked kind of sweet and hormonal, in the full grip of The Madness. What brought them together, I wondered, and what would tear them apart? Kids. So cynical, this younger generation, and yet they still fall in love.
On West 3rd, I found a Korean greengrocer, a bright circle of light on the corner, with the typical alfresco fruit display, oranges, limes, apples, melons—bright colors gleaming in the darkness, like Aladdin’s cave of jewels. I popped in and got an Evian, very efficiently snatching it out of the cooler and plopping it down with two bucks on the counter. The greengrocer ignored me. He was looking out the door at a parked car and a man who was studying the front tire closely.
“Wait for it,” he whispered to me.
The man bent over and tried to grab something stuck halfway under the tire. After several tries, he stomped off cursing.
The grocer burst into laughter.
“It’s a ten-dollar bill. I put it there,” he said to me, and winked. He laughed some more and took my money.
What people do to amuse themselves. I swear to God, everyone in this city is nuts.
The Backslash was on Bleecker, just down from where it meets MacDougal, aka Coffeehouse Junction because there is a coffeehouse on every corner of this intersection. It was coming back to me. We had come to this place after the disco with George and Billy, when it was Cafe Buñuel. Julie had read about it in one of the magazines, or seen it in the background of a fashion layout or something. It was an old-time, beatniky Greenwich Village place where you imagined a bunch of goateed guys in berets and black turtlenecks discussing The Bomb and Burroughs with pale girls in black capri pants. When Julie and I went there in 1979, it was bereft of berets, but something of that atmosphere still lingered.
Now it was an Internet café, essentially a coffeehouse with computers. Patrons get a java and sit down in front of a computer screen to go online, interacting not with each other, but with folks in cyberspace. It was weird, quiet, just the hum of computers, the click of mice, and the squoosh of the cappuccino machine. Very spooky and antisocial.
After getting me a coffee and asking me the skill-testing question—“Who was Hummer High’s Athlete of the Year in 1975?”—the languid young man behind the ornate antique cash register handed me an envelope. This time, the skill-testing question wasn’t about me, not directly. The answer was: Doug Gribetz. Kathy wouldn’t know this answer.
“Someone else was in asking about the envelope,” the young man said.
“Who?”
“A woman in a green wig and Groucho glasses, but she couldn’t answer the question,” he said.
“Hmmm. Thanks,” I said, and took my coffee to a little round marble table.
Inside the envelope, there was another cootie catcher, a photo, and half a dollar bill. The typed note inside the cootie catcher said, “Wait for contact.” That was it.
The half dollar bill had French handwriting on it. George had spoken to me in French again here, and at that point, to cover my ass, I’d told him that I read French better than I spoke it, though I did neither. He wrote something on a dollar bill and handed it to me.
“What does it say?” Billy had asked.
“May all your dreams come true,” George had said. “It’s good luck.”
After nodding stupidly, as if I knew what he’d written, I took the dollar and put it in my purse. George said something else to me in French, and when I didn’t answer, he winked again, and started talking in English. The thing about the dollar bill was, later that night, when we got back to the hotel, I ripped it in half and gave half to Julie so we could each have some of the good luck contained therein. The plan was, we would tape the dollar together the next time we came to New York and spend it on something for both of us. Somehow, we believed this would activate the good luck and make our wishes come true.
Now I had a little French under my belt, and I could read the partial sentence on this half-dollar.
“Il essaie …” it said. He is trying.
How strange. I wondered what the second half of the dollar bill said. I had it tucked away somewhere.
The photo, which showed Julie with George in front of the old Cafe Buñuel, stopped me cold. I looked more closely at it. You know how sometimes you see a movie you first saw a long time ago, and you recognize a now famous actor in it? When you watched it the first time, he or she was unknown, and so he or she didn’t really register with you. The supporting or minor character played by the now famous person appears larger, and the movie takes on a whole different dimension.
Well, that’s how I felt when I looked at the photo. I recognized George from somewhere other than that night, somewhere since. George was smiling broadly for the camera, his arm around Julie.
The photo was of poor quality, but as I remembered it, both George and Billy were good-looking in a swarthy kind of way, George a bit taller with distinctive flaring nostrils, Billy a bit plumper with a piggy nose. I couldn’t be sure. There were no pictures of Billy, and I couldn’t for the life of me fix his face in my mind.
A couple of years after that trip, when I was older and wiser, etc., I figured that Billy was camera-shy because he was probably married. He didn’t wear a ring, but lots of men didn’t, and don’t, even today.
Now I wondered if Billy wasn’t secretly gay. Though he didn’t look gay—he was macho to the nth—a lot of gay guys I know don’t look or act “gay,” and some latent gays overcompensate with hypermasculinity. Billy stuck to George like glue, and was more interested in watching him on the dance floor than watching me, and they went to the men’s room together a few times. Wow. I’d never thought about it before, but now I figured either they were doing coke in the john, or Billy was trying to cop an ogle at the urinals or something.
Come to think of it, George must have picked up on that weird vibe from Billy too, I thought. At Cafe Buñuel, he had whispered something in Julie’s ear before he went to the men’s room, and when Billy tried to get up, Julie pulled him down, put her arm through his, and said, “Don’t desert us!” We held him there, laughing. We thought it was a big game.
Of course, I couldn’t tell then that either or both of them were gay. I didn’t know the Village People were gay stereotypes until I had been living in New York for about six months and one of my college friends told me, that’s how naïve I was.
Wait for contact, said the typed “clue.” Contact would be helpful, since I hadn’t a clue where to go next. I remembered a lot of things we did on that trip, but I didn’t remember exactly when we did them. Time and geography blend together after the passage of years. Even my ex, Burke, and his fiancée, Gwen, after knowing each other just under a year, confused their memories of shared events. At dinner in L.A., they told a story about their European vacation and had to keep referring to each other during their joint storytelling—“What day did we get stuck behind the long line of turnip trucks?” “In Slovakia, after we took that wrong turn?” “Yeah.” “Monday, Tuesday, the same day we lost the muffler on the Skoda.” “No no, we lost the muffler in Prague.…”
Another reason I didn’t remember that eve
ning as clearly as I should, aside from the passage of time and all the wine spritzers, was that I was so self-conscious, so focused on not giving myself away in the face of all our big old lies, that I didn’t pay attention to a lot of other stuff going on.
Where the hell did we go next? I remembered Julie and George whooping it up on Bleecker Street and Julie asserting at the top of her lungs that she wasn’t tired. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she said, her motto du jour. This was, after all, the city that never sleeps, and we were young. George put his arm around Julie and they giggled, while the morose Billy and I walked behind them in silence. Shortly after, as I recalled, some friends of George and Billy’s arrived and Billy left with them, while George, Julie, and I continued on.
Next … next. I wracked my brain. Was it the … the Staten Island Ferry? Yeah, we’d taken the ferry for the ride past the Statue of Liberty at 3 A.M. There were hardly any people aboard, and we drank coffee out of paper cups with one of the ferry engineers, who showed us pictures from his last vacation at a nudist colony.
No, that was the night I went out with Ricardo, a disco promoter I met in the hotel lobby, and Julie went out alone with George. Ricardo was back in his hometown for the big disco convention. Though Julie was anxious about him—“He’s Puerto Rican or black or something, you don’t even know him”—I took up his offer to go out because he’d made me laugh in the lobby and seemed like a nice guy … and I was sick of hanging around with Julie and George, who only had eyes for each other. Ricardo took me to eat at a Brooklyn diner called the Blue Bird Diner, then we went back to Manhattan to a disco in Spanish Harlem. I was the whitest person there, which was strange for me, coming from a pigmentless part of the nation, but nobody made it a problem for me, even though I was with a dark-skinned man. Au contraire. Everyone was really friendly. Anyway, we ended the night on the Staten Island Ferry. That was my third or fourth night in New York.
If only we hadn’t had so much to drink that second night …
“Are you Robin Hudson?”
I looked up. A woman in a green wig and Groucho-nose glasses was looking down at me. It wasn’t Kathy.
“Yes.”
“Are you looking for Kathy?” she said, with a heavy New York accent.
“Yeah.”
“Come with me,” she said.
Contact.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Up to the corner of LaGuardia Place,” she said. “This won’t take long.”
“And who are you?” I said to the woman. “Are you a friend of Julie’s?”
She just smiled at me.
When we got to LaGuardia and Bleecker, also known as the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk because there used to be a tavern by that name on this corner, the green-haired woman said, “Cross over to that lot.”
She was pointing to a little parking area in front of a strip of shops. There was a black car parked there.
We crossed and she said, “Get in the car.”
A voice in my head said, “Never get into cars with strangers.” But I hesitated only for a moment because this was just so Julie-esque.
8
THE CAR DOOR OPENED, and I slid into the back seat. In the shadowy car, there were three more women in green wigs and Groucho-nose glasses. The woman who had walked me over slid in behind me. The car was heavy with the smell of Shalimar.
The woman to my left, apparently the head woman, said, “Kathy is fine.”
“Thanks for letting me know. I was a bit worried. I’m very anxious to find her.”
“Good,” the woman said. She turned to the bewigged woman in the front and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
The car pulled out into the street. About three feet later it stopped. Traffic was really bad.
“Did Julie dream up those outfits, or did you?” I said.
“Julie?” she said, with an odd, perplexed note in her voice. “No, I did.”
Yeah, I should have guessed that. Their costumes were strictly off the rack, cheap polymer wigs and the kind of nose glasses you can buy in any convenience store in New York on Halloween. If Julie had done the costumes, she would have made them bearded ladies or Jehovah’s Witnesses. If Julie had done them as Groucho, who is one of my personal heroes, they would look like authentic, quality Grouchos. Or she would have made each of them a different Marx brother, and put them in dresses, made them the Marx Sisters. She had imagination.
“Are you actors she hired, or friends of Julie’s?” I asked.
The head woman looked at me coldly. “Actors,” she fairly snapped at me.
Touchy, jeez. It’s so easy to offend some people.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to block the action or ruin the fun or whatever,” I said. “Are you going to give me a clue?”
The car drove forward again, stopping after a block.
“Yeah, we’ve got a clue for you,” the woman to my left said. “This is the skill-testing question: When did you last speak to Julie Goomey?”
She lit a cigarette and exhaled in my direction.
Her accent was hard to place. I couldn’t tell if she normally had an upper-class accent and was affecting the borough accent or vice versa, if she was trying to do either Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinnie or Bette Davis in All About Eve.
“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said.
“What did the last clue say?”
“Wait for contact.”
“Contact. Uh-huh,” she said, and dragged on her cigarette. “The clue is to go to the next place, and don’t quit until you find Granny.”
“Granny!” I laughed in spite of myself. “Then you’re going to load up the truck and head to Beverleee? Look, you’re probably a great actress and you’d rather be doing Uncle Vanya than this. But, you see, I’m tired. If you know where I’m supposed to go next, please tell me.”
There was silence, then she said, “We don’t know where you’re supposed to go next. We’re just here to keep an eye on you.”
“All right. So, when I find Granny …”
“You just bring her to us, and we’ll look after the rest,” she said, sounding kind of pissed. “You have until dawn. I have your cell-phone number, I’ll be calling you, and we’ll be watching you.”
“Did you call me about half an hour ago?”
“No. Someone else called you about this?”
“Possibly. I couldn’t hear over the parade.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you’re going to be … tested, like. Others may ask you about Julie Goomey,” the head woman said, exhaling cigarette smoke as she did. “Do not give them any information. If you do, you blow everything.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. I’m not as young as I used to be. I can’t keep up with Julie’s byzantine games anymore.”
“I understand,” said the head woman.
She sounded older than me, but maybe it was just because she was tired too, or “acting.” She hadn’t done a very good job, but what can you expect? What a sucky life that can be, being an actor in New York, having to support yourself temping or waitressing, doing singing telegrams and dressing up like a chicken to hand out brochures to people outside McDonald’s. I knew lots of people who did it in college, some very successful now, and it was all just part of the adventure to them. But they were young then. Probably the adventure of it wears off by the time you hit forty and are still standing outside McDonald’s on a sweltering day in a chicken suit.
How could they know that for her pranks Julie was legendary—in her mind, in mine, and in those of her other coconspirators and victims? You had to get up pretty early in the morning not to fall for Julie’s stunts. This one reminded me of the time we enlisted the drama club to send the Valhalla High football team and pep squad on that wild-goose chase, while we, with the help of several boys and a van, stole the Valhalla mascot, the Iron Maiden. The Iron Maiden was a plaster-of-paris statue of a woman, kneeling, her mouth in a beseeching O. When she was found the next morni
ng, she was placed facing our mascot, the god Vulcan, who was standing. The maiden’s beseeching O was at Vulcan’s crotch level, making it look from twenty feet away like she was giving him a blow job. Vulcan’s Hummer. It was Julie who saw the Iron Maiden and envisioned the tableau, Julie who persuaded the drama club to take part. She gave participants only a piece of the puzzle, though, not the whole thing, so no one party could reveal the extent of the conspiracy. Oh, if only Richard Nixon had known Julie Goomey.
Finally, the car stopped, and I got out at Broadway and Broome Street, down in SoHo, and I waved goodbye to the green-wigged, mustachioed women.
Which way to go? If it hadn’t been for Kathy, I would have canned the whole thing and gone home, figuring Julie could bloody well call me on the telephone like a sane person if she wanted to mend our fences. But, poor Kathy, she was probably sitting somewhere with Julie, waiting patiently for me, bored. If I was lucky she was bored. Possibly, she was being lavishly entertained by Julie’s embarrassing stories about me. Julie knew some good ones, things even I don’t care to admit to, like the time Julie made me laugh so hard in sixth-grade assembly that I peed in my pants, which everyone in the school saw. Or the time I was cheer-leading during an important high-school football game and I wiped out in a big mud puddle. Even the fact that I was a cheerleader was something I’d omitted in the c.v. I recited to Kathy. (I only became a cheerleader because it seemed to me that boys especially liked girls who stayed on the sidelines and cheered them on, and I liked boys a lot.)
Kathy looked up to me and I liked that. I wasn’t used to it. There were so many ways Julie could shake the image of me I’d carefully constructed for Kathy, the efficient, mature, self-made executive image.
Okay, I admit, I had another reason to keep going, aside from Kathy. I wanted to solve this one. Julie was always so much better at this kind of thing than me. I’d never quite forgiven her for solving Rubik’s Cube in ten tries.
On Broadway, I looked one way, then the next, but had no idea in which direction to go. Someone dressed as Munch’s The Scream stopped me and asked me if I knew where West Broadway was. I felt like she looked. She was an out-of-towner, she said, thought West Broadway was just a particular side of Broadway, and didn’t know it was a whole separate street. I pointed the way and watched her walk away, past a scavenger pushing a huge cart full of stuff down the middle of the street, looking like a World War II refugee. I don’t think he was in costume. Ever since the city installed pinkish street lamps, the streets downtown have looked like one of those after-dark Brassaï photographs of 1930s Paris.
Revenge of the Cootie Girls Page 8